After a career built on conceptual art, Damien Hirst turned to paint and
canvas - and the boos from the critics were unanimous. Mark Hudson
fears he had it coming.

This week we may have witnessed one of the pivotal moments in the history of art. Not only has Damien Hirst, arguably the richest and most powerful artist in history, received the critical pasting of his life, but there's a sense that our whole perception of what art is, or should be, may have subtly – or not so subtly – shifted.

In case you've been miles from the media over the past week, Hirst, the man who became famous by putting sharks and sheep in formaldehyde, who summed up the 21st century confluence of art and shameless materialism with a £50 million diamond-encrusted skull – none of which he actually made himself – decided to exhibit paintings executed with his own hand in one of Britain's most august art institutions, the Wallace Collection.

Here, Hirst's daubs have been hung on walls newly lined in blue silk at a cost of £250,000, close to, if not actually alongside works by Titian, Rembrandt, Velasquez and Poussin. The result has been one of the most unanimously negative responses to any exhibition in living memory. Sarah Crompton, writing in this paper, was one of the kinder critics, finding the paintings merely "thin and one note". "Deadly dull, amateurish", wrote the Guardian's critic. "Not worth looking at", said the Independent. "Dreadful", pronounced The Times.

Having observed Hirst's career closely, I'm not the least bit surprised that he should have taken on a project of this nature, nor that the Wallace Collection should have agreed to show it – still less that the results were pretty terrible. What surprises me is the unprecedented unanimity of the response.

In the 21 years since Hirst launched the so-called Young British Artist phenomenon with the "Freeze" exhibition while he was still a student at Goldsmiths College, there has been endless carping in the popular press, occasional rumbles of dissent from the broadsheet critics, but never any concerted critical challenge. Bright, brash and British – though rarely, in truth, more than that – the YBAs represented the spirit of the time, when the Eighties boom rolled, with only the occasional minor recession, into the Cool Britannia years.

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Not to like the dipsy wild-card Tracey Emin, self-styled bad boys Jake and Dinos Chapman and the spectacularly vacuous Sam Taylor-Wood was simply to be out of touch. Never mind that most of their supposed innovations had been made by other artists, most of whom had stayed poor, decades before. Ordering his art to be made by other people over the telephone, which earned Hirst such admiration and notoriety in the 1990s, had been done by the Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in 1924. Indeed, the very name is telling: while the names of other modern art movements, from Cubism to Pop, tell you about their intentions, the term YBA says nothing more than that they were young and British.

No, the groundbreaking aspects of the YBA phenomenon related almost exclusively to money and celebrity. When people look back to the initial "Freeze" exhibition, it's to the fact that the catalogue of a student show was sponsored by property developers Olympia & York. The actual content of the exhibition is rarely mentioned. The entire meaning of Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull is embodied in its price. The title, For the Love of God, is meaningless spin.

And it seemed that the less the YBAs did in terms of creating the work – delighting in appearing to break the rules about skill and personal involvement – the more the noughts rolled on to their prices. Never one to shrink from brinkmanship honesty, Hirst declared that his mechanically produced "spin" paintings were "bright, cheerful, but basically meaningless". Far from being put off, buyers appeared simply not to hear what he was saying.

And once you've accepted that Tracey is the art world's Chantelle or Jade Goody, famous largely for being Tracey Emin – and that that is part of her art – that none of Hirst's spot paintings were done by him (anyone could have done them? Anyone did do them), you don't really have anywhere else to go as a critic. You either accept the package or you don't, and what is there to say about more spot paintings or more witless attention-seeking?

Indeed, if today saw a seismic shift in the art Zeitgeist, it wasn't because Hirst hadn't done the paintings, but because he had. He had put brush and oil paint on to canvas – an act that has been central to European art since the 15th century – and was found wanting.

The fact that he appeared to be attempting to align himself with the other great artists in that gallery, by using Old Master imagery such as the skull, that he employed a dark blue-dominated palette reminiscent of the early works of his hero Francis Bacon, while making reference to Picasso's Blue Period in the title of the exhibition, merely compounded the offence. Hirst's presumption in comparison with the technical inadequacy of the work was simply unforgiveable. For once, chutzpah wasn't enough.

Tom Lubbock, writing in the Independent, felt the need to preface his particularly acerbic remarks by reiterating – in an almost apologetic manner – one of the great mantras of contemporary art, that "skills needn't matter". Yet perhaps the great lesson of today's responses to Hirst's paintings is that skills most definitely do, should and always will matter.

And what's most significant is that the people behind today's apparent backlash aren't the "a-child-of-four-could-do-that" brigade, but people who really know their stuff: writers with an understanding of the art of all eras who have had to pander to every kind of money-inflated idiocy in order to appear relevant in our ever more uncertain cultural market place – in order, simply, to keep their jobs. But now the critical worm has turned.

This isn't the first time that technically inept oil painting has been elevated to the position of high art. Hirst's paintings remind me of nothing so much as the lesser products of the so-called New Image Painting of the 1980s that gave rise to art world stars such as Julian Schnabel and Georg Baselitz. After the aridity of Minimalism there was a sense of relief in getting messy emotion on to the canvas. And since you couldn't hope to emulate the technique of the Old Masters, you might as well do it badly – if with plenty of heart.

No one has made such comparisons today, perhaps because they don't want to dilute their observations, to fall back on the kind of relative judgment that would feel all too typical of our mealy-mouthed times, by looking at something that is outright bad in the context of something that is slightly less bad.

Reading Hirst's comments in this Saturday's Telegraph Review, in which he invoked his own name alongside those of genuine 20th century masters such as Bacon and Mark Rothko, you couldn't help feeling you were living in a world that had lost touch with some fundamental reality. Perhaps, in our money-obsessed, YouTube watching, "skills don't matter" world where nonentities dominate the airwaves and the consumer is king there really is no difference in worth between a real early Francis Bacon and one of the works of his technically challenged, multi-millionaire fan.

If today's events do nothing else, they affirm that that is not the case.

Whether or not they strike a deeper note among artists themselves, there's no doubt that a corner has been turned. While little difference may have been made to the overall trajectory of Hirst's career – or more specifically his prices – it is heartening to see that the world, or those aspects of it represented by the British media, retains a lot more integrity than many would have given it credit for.